Bureaucratic English are very unAmerican

by Forrest Sheng Bao http://fsbao.net

I strongly dislike reading emails or papers in bureaucratic English, i.e., English of verbose structures of void words.

For example, please do not say "I've made the decision." I prefer "I've decided."

Bureaucratic sentences take me more time to read and long structures distract me. Longer emails or papers will also consume more natural resources in both soft and hard copies. I prefer to Go Green.

Geroge Orwell pointed out this problem in 1946 in his essay "Politics and the English language." You can Google to read this essay. For example, "contact" is better than "make contact with". Why would you use 3 words whereas 1 word is equivalent?

Besides this, I dislike another way to "prolong" sentences. Please do not say "I have modified some places on the basis of 2nd version. " I prefer to say "I have revised the 2nd version." - Actually, you don't wanna express whether the changes are major or minor.

This problem is very particular in British English. I prefer papers written by international (not English language native) authors. Their sentences are very compact, without rhetoric or stylish stuffs.

Chinese used in mainland China also have this problem. Communism propaganda machine has brainwashed people's way of critical thinking and speaking Chinese. Government official news are super long, full of bureaucratic and void words. They have also created many phrases that do not follow any Chinese grammar. A whole paragraph of their articles can express the same and tiny idea - like non-coding segments in a genome. One reason they do so may be to distract people in understanding their ideas and therefore prevent people from thinking the logic in their nonsense. Taiwanese or Singaporean gov docs are more concise and shorter.

So, bureaucratic sentences are very British or Communism, thus, unAmerican. Go green, and please say concise sentences.